


Never Bespoken

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:33:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'd had other suits, actually (eventually), but after Katie'd died he'd thrown them all away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Bespoken

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** CLOTHING SOFT CORE PORN. Maybe. She wanted clothing, no sex.  
>  **Author's Notes:** Set during "Combat." It's…got the overzealousness of a puppy on crack. Don't rib me about the suit Owen wears. I didn't rewatch.

Owen had one suit. One suit that he bought at Marks and Spencer when he'd first graduated from medical school and they'd said something like, "you must wear a suit to the ceremony." He was shit poor in those days, and any extra money he did have he spent on beer and the occasional trip to the chip shop in the few hours in the week that he had to spare on things like eating and sleeping. So he'd sold a few pints of blood, a few textbooks, and a few vinyl albums he no longer had the time to listen to and strode off to the shops the day of graduation, swagger of the newly matriculated in his step.

The suit had been off the rack, and that was fine. Owen never really got the point of fitted things. Everything else in his wardrobe was ready to wear, why should his suit be any different? He had drawn the line at the ones labeled 'wash and wear.' Something sensible, black, and he could use it for interviews, too. All the better, then.

He'd had other suits, actually (eventually), but after Katie'd died he'd thrown them all away. He hadn't needed them at Torchwood, after all, and he'd worn every single one of them some time over the course of their life together, for one special thing or another, and he didn't want to have to think about it. He'd cleaned out his flat with the efficiency that he used when he hosed down the autopsy theatre: broad sweeping strokes, brash hard movements, and over reaching ragged enthusiasm. In their place he put a never ending rainbow of monochrome T-shirts and denims, leather jackets, holster rigs and the one "shiny shirt" that had used once for clubbing, and couldn't bring himself to throw away since he was fairly sure that he'd gotten a blow job from Jenna Jamison in the back hallway of the club while he was wearing it.

The shirt, he decided was both a loaded lucky charm, and also dubiously powerful, and Owen believed that with great power came great responsibility.

The suit he'd worn for Diane had been his medical school one, and he'd remembered being dismayed and a little nervous when he put it on, looking at the store bought quality of it. He shouldn't have thrown the others away. But then she had stepped out of the bedroom with that fucking _incredible_ dress on, and he'd just forgotten about it. She'd never said anything about the suit, not the way Katie had when she'd first seen it, and hell, she was from 1953, so he could have worn a fucking leisure suit and she probably wouldn't have cared.

The suit had been dry cleaned since then, but he'd had to pull it out when Jack had said that he was going to go undercover. He had to come in early to make the videos for the website, and after that, Ianto had come in with coffee for them all, fresh as a goddamn daisy, and taken one look at Owen and _stared_.

Owen lowered the coffee cup and stared back. "What?"

Ianto looked away, but his eyes trailed back to Owen. He wasn't looking at Owen's face. It was his suit. Owen stared at Ianto's flawless three piece and knew that he was screwed. The mockery would come. Dryly. With trumpets. And Hob-Nobs, probably.

"Nothing," Ianto said into his cup, and then he perched on the table near Jack and listened to the tail end of the meeting.

Owen's appointment with Mark Lynch wasn't until three, so he lazed about, thought about playing a few video games, or maybe doing some of the paperwork he had stacking up on his desk. He shuffled a few files and then congratulated himself on a job well avoided. Tosh re-recorded his voice for the company greeting. Gwen asked him how he felt and he managed to duck into the toilet in time to avoid his feelings. Jack did his impression of Owen, shuffled his own papers about, and then smiled and made a few suggestive comments when Ianto remarked on the molasses-like quality of all things bureaucratic. Owen was fairly sure they were using the term "red tape" as code for something else.

He was in the kitchenette thinking about how Diane had eaten all of his Nutella in the week she'd been at his flat when Ianto appeared from nowhere and scared the piss out of him.

"Jesus Christ, Jones," he swore, shoving the jar on the counter and trying to look like he hadn't been brooding about a bird. "Wear a fucking bell."

Ianto blinked. "Jack took the bell," he answered smoothly, and didn't elaborate. Owen didn't want him to.

It seemed that Ianto couldn't keep his eyes off his fucking store bought suit. His fingers closed on the lapel and he wrinkled his nose. "Is this. Is this an Autograph?"

Owen couldn't process the questions for a second, but eventually he opened the jacket to look at the label. "Yeah," he said, eyes narrowing. "So?"

Ianto blinked. "No. Tell me you have another."

Owen pulled away from him and held onto the flaps of the jacket. "What? No."

Ianto's fingers hung in the air, as if he didn't know what to do with them, and then they descended on Owen's shoulders, running along the seams of the sleeves, his nose wrinkling a bit, like when Jack made him coffee, or when the take away place added too much cumin to his tandoori. "Fusing. You can't. You just…"

Owen rolled his eyes. "This is my suit." He knew it was a shitty suit, five years out of date, but he didn't _care_. It was _his_ suit. "If you don't like it, get me another one."

He didn't like the glimmer in Ianto's eyes.

***

He was in the boardroom, bouncing a boxful of rubber balls off the railings, into the atrium and off the walls when Ianto found him again, a garment bag hanging from one hand, a cup of tea in the other. Owen rolled his eyes.

"This suit is fine. I sell fucking jellied _eels_."

Ianto cocked his head and looked at him, and Owen felt the urge to stand up and strip off his jacket. Ianto had never bothered him before. He wondered if giving Jack head had some sort of peripheral benefits. "Fine, but if I don’t like it, I'm not wearing it. Nothing red or pink or teal."

Ianto hung the garment bag on an exposed edge of the makeshift conference room walls and pulled the zip. "It was the best I could do, the shop is swamped," Ianto said, pulling the bag from the hanger and revealing the suit inside. "Worsted, single breasted. Daks tops." He smoothed his hands down the jacket and looked over his shoulder at Owen. "Strip."

Owen stared at the red back of his waistcoat gleaming in the light. "Come what now?"

Ianto turned then, eyes wide, slightly exasperated. "Strip off that thing, and put on this suit." He checked his watch. "You have twenty minutes."

Owen slid the jacket from his arms and draped it over the back of his chair, then yanked his shirt out of his trousers, undid the belt and removed it in one tug. Pants followed the jacket on the chair, hanging empty like deflated shells that he'd melted out of, reforming next to Ianto and his finely tailored suit, a suit that was certainly better than anything he'd ever owned, even when he'd made the money to drop on those kinds of things.

"How do you even know my—"

Ianto glanced at him, and the look on his face was inexplicable. In that moment Owen didn't have to ask anymore. Ianto just knew these things, like some creepy fucking clothing fairy. He stood there in his boxers and shirt and tie, trying to look as inconvenienced as he felt, tapping his foot while Ianto fussed with linings and lint or something. By the time Ianto had turned to him, he was reaching for his trousers.

"Oh no," Ianto said, pulling a crisply pressed shirt from the hanger behind the suit. "The shirt and tie have to go as well."

Owen crossed his arms. "The tie, _maybe_. The shirt is fine."

"That shirt is not fine," Ianto said. "It stands out. You might was well wear trainers." He reached for Owen's tie at the neck, stopping himself before he touched the knot and instead looking Owen in the eye before saying, "Trust me, just this once."

He grumbled and then the tie wound about the belt on the table, snakes of leather and silk, and then the shirt fluttered onto the pile of clothes, another part of him on the Torchwood floor, Ianto holding the shirt by the collar and _Jesus_ he could tell just by looking at the stitching that it hadn't been made in a factory.

Owen slid on the shirt and buttoned it, then stepped into the trousers, raising an eye at the lack of cuffs. Ianto's gaze must have followed his because he shook his head and smiled fondly. "Your legs are too thin to wear cuffed flat fronts." It was rather a foreign language to Owen, and he decided that either Ianto was a secret seamstress or he just knew everything. Somehow, the latter was more comforting.

"The inseam is off," Ianto said softly, kneeling down to run his hands along Owen's leg, flat of his palm on the inside of the thigh, his head bobbing so very close to the front of the trousers. "But not too badly. Passable."

They looked fine to Owen, and he let Ianto mess about with the daks tops before batting his hands away. It felt naked without the belt.

"You didn't just have this laying about," Owen said, waving his hands as the unfolded cuffs flapped comically.

Ianto had the gall to look smug. "No, actually, they've been working on it for a while. Wanted to tuck it away, just in case."

Owen didn't ask what the just in case was. "I don't need a suit anymore," Owen said to him, trying to make his voice sound firm, and a little pissed off, which wasn't too difficult, because most of him fucking was. "I work at Torchwood, and no one fucking cares. Look at Jack, for Christ's sake."

Ianto's reached behind him for a tie (of course there had been something wrong with Owen's tie, of course) before bothering to answer. "Every man at Torchwood needs one good suit," he said. His eyes met Owen's, and his fingers skimmed over Owen's hand when he relinquished the tie. "Preferably a black one, but navy will suffice." Here he smiled. "Black drowns you out anyway."

Owen flipped the collar up and slid the tie along, the _fwip_ of silk settling into place as he eyed the tail. "Yeah, well, then they should pay us enough to afford one of these things."

Ianto snorted and reached out, batting his hands away. "Consider this part of your hiring package, much too late," he added. "I hid it in last month's sundries expenses." When Owen let his hands drop so that Ianto could take over, Ianto's fingers started from the back of his neck, smoothing the tie compulsively, as if he had a system for this. He probably did.

"Fifteen hundred pounds of sundries?" Owen guessed.

Ianto focused on the knot he was making. "Jack drinks a lot of coffee."

Fingers pressed a bit on his throat, the tie went _fwip fwrrm, fwip_ through a loop and down. Ianto's hands ghosted across his chest, knuckles grazing him lightly. His brow knotted a bit in concentration, and he closed his eyes. "Sometimes I forget how to do this to another person, but ah!" One last bit of silk and another brush of a feather light hand. "There. Half-Windsor." He smiled to himself in satisfaction. "Smart and dapper. Says 'Don't waste my time'." He straightened the knot and flipped the collar down, letting his hands trail down Owen's shoulders and off of the sharp joints of the elbow.

Owen sighed a little. "I do hate to waste my time." His eyes connected with Ianto's and he folded the French cuffs. "I do have a lot of jellied eels to import." Ianto rolled his eyes and tossed him a small plastic packet unwrapped to reveal cufflinks. Owen eyed them suspiciously. "Is that…is that the Torchwood Logo?"

Ianto squinted at the links in Owen's hand and sighed. "I don't even understand how that gets everywhere," he groaned.

Owen shrugged. "It's on the basketball backboard," he reminded him. "and every wall here."

Ianto glanced behind him and smiled. "Yes, well, you can't wear them undercover. Take mine," he said, reaching for one of his cuffs.

Owen watched him slightly undress, the inside of his wrist pale and throbbing with the veins, veins that Owen could name in Latin. The cuffs blossomed open and closed as Ianto transplanted the new links into them. Owen bent his head over Ianto's links. He'd always had button-cuffs, and his fingers fumbled over the mechanism, but he glared at Ianto when he moved to help him. He was a fucking doctor, he could put in a cufflink.

Ianto sipped his tea while Owen replaced his shoes, which apparently had passed muster, or, as Owen secretly suspected, Ianto simply hadn't managed to find a cow to cut the leather out of, then send to a master cobbler and have them crafted from scratch.

It bothered him then that Ianto's own suit didn't seem as nice as the one he was currently wearing. He was about to make a joke about becoming the new teaboy when Ianto held up the jacket for him as he stood. His belt flashed at his waist and Owen _knew_ he was the one with more money on his back, for once.

Ianto held the jacket for him, and he stepped back into it, like he'd seen Jack do with the greatcoat so many times. Ianto's fingers brushed the back of his neck as they slid up into the center of the collar and then followed down over the shoulders, fingers doing a million little things that Owen would have never noticed or cared about. He usually stuck his arms in at the same time from the front and pulled the coat over his head.

He closed his eyes and imagined that he was someone different. He was the kind of person who would actually _buy_ this garment. He was the kind of person who would have somewhere to wear it, aside from going undercover. He was the kind of person who had a woman, a girl that loved to see him in a good suit, walking towards her from across a posh hotel, where they'd been staying until they could buy a nice house in an affluent part of town, or a penthouse condo up in one of the numerous mirrored skyscrapers that seemed to have sprouted overnight all through Cardiff like mutant monoliths.

"Yowsa," Jack said, and Owen's eyes shot open. "That's hot." Jack leaned against the doorframe and smiled. "Still, should have gone for braces."

Ianto snorted behind him. "Yes, well, we were looking for less blue collar."

Owen transferred his wallet and keys to his pockets and watched Jack look down at his suspenders and shirt. "My collar _is_ blue," he mumbled. Then he leaned forward to pat Owen on the back when he walked into the atrium. "You're both wearing suits," he mused. "I think I died and went to some heaven like place."

For one second, Owen thought he felt the press of Ianto's hand on the small of his back, but when he turned, there was nothing.

END


End file.
